John White ALEXANDER ✿

John White Alexander (Allegheny City, 1856 – New York, 1918) was an American portrait, figure, and decorative painter and illustrator.

He moved to New York City at the age of 18 and worked in an office at Harper's Weekly, where he was an illustrator and political cartoonist at the same time that Abbey, Pennell, Pyle, and other celebrated illustrators labored there.

After an apprenticeship of three years, he traveled to Munich for his first formal training. Owing to the lack of funds, he removed to the village of Polling, Bavaria, and worked with Frank Duveneck. They traveled to Venice, where he profited by the advice of Whistler, and then he continued his studies in Florence, Italy; the Netherlands; and Paris.

In 1881, he returned to New York City and speedily achieved great success in portraiture, numbering among his sitters Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Henry G. Marquand, R.A.L. Stevenson, and president McCosh of Princeton University.

His first exhibition in the Paris Salon of 1893 was a brilliant success and was followed by his immediate election to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. Many additional honors were bestowed on him. In 1889 he painted for Mrs. Jeremiah Milbank a well-received portrait of Walt Whitman and one of her husband, Jeremiah Milbank.

In 1901, he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1902, he became a member of the National Academy of Design, where he served as president from 1909 to 1915. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and President of the National Society of Mural Painters.

Among the gold medals received by him were those of the Paris Exposition (1900) and the World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri (1904). He served as President of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1914 to 1915.